LBUOYANT

Level 42 and Squeeze: the dicemen returneth.

CRYSTAL PALACE, August 4, 1991

Review by Phil Sutcliffe for Q Magazine (October 1991)

The micro-economic indicators at Crystal Palace Bowl are contradictory: the touts are offering tickets at 'less than box office price' but with the opening act not even on stage, the Level 42 official merchandise stall outside the gates stands unattended, displaying only a scrawled notice: 'Sold out - more inside'.
Backstage, Mark King of Level 42 is joking that his children think the band must be on its uppers because there's no camera crew immortalising the gig, as there always seemed to be a couple of years ago. While everyone is very buoyant, very pro, whistling a happy tune, the mouths of babes may have touched on a certain unease shared by the headliners and their "special guests", Squeeze. Both bands are about to make their debuts on new labels after humiliating rejections by record companies they'd been with for 10 years or more. For both it's the first major gig at home under the new regimes. 

Still, the sky is smiling and so, eventually, are the weather eyes scanning the crowd as it accumulates through the afternoon to a sunnily disposed 15,000. 

Squeeze nearly made it - twice, twin peaks marked by sell-outs at Madison Square Garden. The first time was in 1982.  "We were doing remarkably well," remembers Chris Difford, "but the band had got to the stage on the treadmill of touring where a massive hangover was about to set in. We should have taken a sabbatical, but we thought it was all over and we split up." 

Difford and Tilbrook worked on as a duo and then, after a three-year hiatus, revived the band. By 1987 Babylon And On had achieved their best album chart positions in America (36) and Britain (apart from a hits compilation - 14) and they were back at MSG. 

"A&M got behind us which was refreshing," says Tilbrook, "but then while we were recording the Frank album, there was a mood change because the company was in the process of being sold and people were nervous about their jobs. Suddenly they weren't returning our calls. We delivered Frank and heard nothing. They put it out, but it sank like a stone. We were halfway through a tour promoting it when we heard that A&M had dropped us." 

At which the two lean back and laugh uproariously.

"It was really great," Difford snorts. "We owed them loads of money and it meant we didn't have to pay it back!" 

"Fortunately Mo Ostin at Warners had said to us that if anything ever happened, get in touch," says Tilbrook. "So a deal was struck." 

Between companies, they put out a potboiling live album on their original manager Miles Copeland's IRS label and again parted company with keyboard player Jools Holland. The songwriting team persisted, indefatigable after 17 years as partners (exactly half of Tilbrook's life; Difford is 36). 

"The plumbers of emotion, that's us," chortles Difford. 

"I got through my worries about being too old when I was 24. It gave me really bad problems then," says Tilbrook. "I become paranoid about the validity of what we were doing."

"We've been in and out of Division One so many times now, we're past caring," Difford chuckles and they crease up again, honking like two happy seals on an ice flow, on and on.

Beneath the two gigantic pink furry dice with which Level 42 have self-mockingly customised the stage, Squeeze set about making the big match look easy. Funny, even when they're telling a sour and sorry tale, Squeeze have always been a natural sound of summer and in their first moments on stage, the manic momentum of "Hourglass" sweeps the crowd into clapping along, unbidden, hands aloft, as if Squeeze were a band of hard-rocking rabble-rousers. "Take it to the bridge/Throw it overboard/See if it'll swim" -the powerful chorus bops as if words were power chords. That's Squeeze, not to everybody's taste but mass communicative on their day, which this is. 

Thus encouraged, they nail it down with era-spanning memories "Take Me I'm Yours", "Up The Junction", "Tempted" and "Footprints", all wit, wisdom and good tunes. It makes introducing five songs from the new album, Play, within a one-hour set a delicate enterprise.

While "The Day I Go Home", "The Truth", and the profoundly sad ex-love song "Letting Go" hardly renew the invitation to a clapalong, the band and brilliant soundmen combine to put them across with such clarity that attention remains rapt. The applause is warm, even though these are the sort of songs which make partners slip arms around waists while avoiding eye contact-seeking comfort while hoping to avoid the issues raised.

After such sharing of intimate intelligence, audience receptiveness fails to translate into all-whooping insistence on an encore. That it comes anyway is the one false note in Squeeze's performance. Still, it passes off affably enough, if in a spirit of collaboration rather than celebration.

Squeeze's Setlist: Hourglass; Take Me I'm Yours; The Day I Get Home; The Truth; Up The Junction; Sunday Street; Letting Go; Slaughtered Gutted And Heartbroken; Wicked And Cruel; Footprints; Tempted. Encore: Annie Get Your Gun.

Ensconced in his trailer, Mark King, muscular of shoulder and leather of trouser, makes endless cups of tea and smokes a lot - he's started again after five years for stressful reasons he soon makes plain. Since mid-'87, King's band and personal life have been turned upside down. At that point - paralleling Squeeze - Running In The Family had become their biggest album in Britain (2) and America (23).

By the end of that year they had lost founder members Boon and Phil Gould (guitarist, drummer and, separately, lyricists). Twelve months on, with the Staring At The Sun album just released, their new guitarist, Alan Murphy, died of AIDS. Then, last year, when they presented a new album to Polydor, it was rejected. 

'There was a bad vibe setting in after "World Machine," says King. 'We were suddenly a much bigger proposition. We'd been such good friends but we grew apart. We blew it for ourselves.

'Then with Alan, we just had time to become really good friends before he died. It was horrible. We decided to take a break then. I wanted to build my studio at home and put right some of the things Alan's death had made plain to me. The idea of my own mortality hadn't occurred to me before. Someone of your own age dying of a disease that ... it could have been me laying in that bed. I wanted to put the score right. Especially with my marriage, while there was still time, so we didn't lurch into another 10 years of ... convenience. Unfortunately we split up. 

'Anyway, we got down to work on Guaranteed and a couple of people from Polydor came down and said, This is great! We thought so too. But when we turned it in, they started talking about the 'American hit'. What they wanted was (sings as per Vic Reeves impersonating Michael Bolton), 'You're a winner/You're number one/Fully matured over beechwood fires.' All that cobblers. After thinking about it for a few weeks I told them I couldn't do it and their response was, But your contract says an album will contain three songs suitable for seven-inch singles. That's when the lawyers came in and it ended up a bit like a soccer transfer. In the end we went to RCA because they offered us artistic control. Rejection's a terrible thing to handle, isn't it? Still, it's nice to know that just when you think you're through a lot of hassle there's something else to come out of nowhere and bite your arse.

"We're in very good shape now, and today should go well because we're good live - it goes back to our beginnings when we were precious about our musicianship. We wanted to be the best at doing what we were doing.' 

Blessed and blissed by the sun, at the sound of a cow mightily, if mysteriously, mooing through the PA, the crowd rise up from the Crystal Palace pasture as Level 42 plunge straight into Hot Water.

It used to be a three-minute minor hit, but now it gradually dawns it's going on for a very long while and that there seems no pressing need to call a halt because the onrushing essence of live Level 42's widescreen Britunk is that it has so much thumping groove from the well-known King bass and less lauded drums of Gary Husband, plus so much kick and zap and grunt from the ever-sixth-formerly Mike Lindup's keyboards and hired horns. There's so many different bits of verse, chorus and, no doubt, 'middle eight', that it would take a right old misery guts to start checking the watch and complaining that this has gone on for 12 minutes and is therefore infringing critical by-laws in regard to self-indulgence. 

In truth, it simply works. And so does the next one and the next one. Even new songs like Overtime, Guaranteed and If You Were Mine sink their hook lines into those knee joints and keep at least the front 5,000 bobbing and bouncing like the massed start of the London Marathon.

King looks pleased and goes into a brief burst of quasi-existential stand-up much chortled over by the furry dice fraternity. 'Hey, you're so far away,' he says, peering across the lake. 'How do we know it's you? How do you know it's us?'

The 'slow ones', Leaving Me Now and the new She Can't Help Herself evoke large amounts of smooching, swaying and just plain kissing, interrupted before anything more carnal can eventuate by the musically climactic coupling of Lessons In Love and Something About You.

Like Squeeze, Level 42 rather lose their way when it comes to the encores - a diminuendo comprising The Chinese Way, Love Games and, oddly enough, an underplayed bass workout - but by then many of their fans, 20-year-olds for whom prudence is a practised virtue, are thinking traffic jams, crowded platforms and making for the exits, the quick getaway and a perfect end to a very, very nice day.